4.10.2013

Into the Lions' Den

It takes an extra big set of cojones -- not to mention a major serving of stupid -- to make a speech at the nation's most prestigious black university that's based almost entirely on talking points normally shared by racist douchebags trolling the comments section at Yahoo News. But then Rand Paul (R-Stoopid) went and spoke at Howard University:

Paul devoted almost none of his speech Wednesday at the historically black college in Washington, D.C., to explaining the GOP’s thorny relationship with black voters over the last fifty years, and most of it arguing that “the Republican Party has always been the party of civil rights and voting rights.” His history lecture focused almost entirely on the period before 1964, when the GOP began to champion the states rights arguments of southern whites. Echoing a popular conservative talking point, Paul repeatedly reminded the audience that Democrats passed Jim Crow laws in the south and that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, as were the first black legislators and the founders of the NAACP. [emphasis added, ed.]

Did I mention how sick and tired I am of this facile, bullshit argument? What's always left out of the equation, naturally, is that once Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, and it was signed into law by a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, a whole cadre of racist lunatics -- led by those stalwart proponents of justice and equality Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms -- walked right out on the Democratic Party and into the open arms of the Republicans. The very same kind of sanctimonious, libertarian assholes are still running the GOP (see: Rand Paul), only now they are so convinced of their own revisionist lies and simplistic political arguments they have the temerity to stand before black America's finest minds and spout that bullshit like it's something resembling the truth.